ENSIFERUM announce new album 'Thalassic'

The Finnish folk ensemble return with a riff-infused epic.

With now a quarter century of experience under their belt, ENSIFERUM command their post as a leading force within the folk-laden depths of melodic death metal. From their self-titled (2001) debut full-length to Two Paths (2017), the band have ceased to remain comfortable, evolving in musical ability and conceptual storytelling. To usher in the eight chapter in their renowned career, ENSIFERUM will release their new album Thalassic on July 10th via Metal Blade Records. Having added keyboard player/lead clean vocalist Pekka Montin to the fold, ENSIFERUM look to deliver their most grandiose listening experience yet with lead single Rum, Women, Victory serving as proof.

Bassist/vocalist Sami Hinkka comments on the themes behind Thalassic:

"The idea of it started to brew in my mind when I was doing interviews for 'Two Paths' and many journalists asked if it was a theme album, and I noticed that I was answering all the time that because of the way we compose it's almost impossible to make a theme album. This really started to piss me off and the decision was made: the next album would have a theme. At that time, we already had a few songs almost ready for the next album, and I started to listen to the demos much more from the feeling aspect instead of analyzing them musically. For some reason, all of them took me to a seashore, and the theme was found: something related to sea or water.

So I started to read about history, myths and legend around the world that had something to do with the theme, but even though all of the lyrics are obviously inspired by this, I tried my best to keep Ensiferum's heroic mentality in them. In the end, there were too many ideas for lyrics, because I didn't set myself any boundaries - like all stories would have to be Nordic, etc, and one of my favourite songs on the album tells about Andromeda from Greek mythology. I can't promise that this way of lyric-writing will be the future of Ensiferum, but at least we did this once."